Razorback Fans Are Hog-Wild for Team

Published 4:00 am, Monday, April 3, 1995

1995-04-03 04:00:00 PDT Seattle -- IT BEGINS with a "Whoooooo," a piercing, numbing air-raid siren of a sound that sets the fillings in your teeth vibrating. Then it gets louder.

College basketball has bands, cheers, whoops and claps. There are yells and bells and cries. This isn't like any of that.

When it started at the Final Four in Seattle, some folks looked in alarm to the section of the Kingdome where the Arkansas fans were sitting. All they could see were hundreds of hands, hallelujahing to the skies and waving their fingers wildly as that god-awful wail built in pitch.

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"Oh, yeah," said Darnell Robinson, the Razorbacks' sophomore center from Emeryville, after the semifinal win over North Carolina. "They woke me up at six this morning, calling the Hogs. And we're on the sixth floor."

It can only get worse. These are pig people, and proud of it.

When Butch Henry was the sports-information director at Arkansas in the '70s, he was talking to a reporter from the New York Times.

"Would you be offended if we called you Hogs?" the reporter asked.

"Let's put it this way," Henry said. "We have the letters H-O-G-S across the front of our cheerleaders' sweaters."

There is no parallel in college athletics to Hogs fans. Which is fine. There's something a little scary about a group that not only wears pig hats on their heads but can tell the vintage at a glance.

The originals, made in the '60s, were considered classics, but the manufacturer lost the mold. An enterprising group of law students formed a company, "Uncle Heavies' Hog Hats," and filled demand.

"Uncle Heavies' is not quite the quality of the original," says Henry, "but it's a good Hog hat."

And that's just the tip of the snout, so to speak. The local ABC television affiliate has the call letters KHOG. The Hogs radio network includes 93 stations. UCLA has eight. North Carolina has 61.

There was a time, Henry recalls, when there were 104 radio stations in Arkansas and 94 of them carried the Hogs.

"That meant," said Henry, "during football season, any time you turned on the radio for three hours every Saturday afternoon, you couldn't listen to anything but the Hogs."

Right now, four radio stations make the Hog call in Fayetteville alone. The Hogs are public domain by state law. Sports-information director Rick Schaeffer explains that when the broadcasts became popular, and money-makers, some of the big stations wanted to buy up the rights. The smaller stations set up such a howl that a state law was forced through the legislature to make certain that there was no such thing as exclusive rights.

There is only one game in this state. Two other schools, Arkansas State and Arkansas-Little Rock have moved up to Division I in the last decade, but they have not even dented the Hogs' popularity.

Picture, if you would, the experience of Davor Rimac, a 3-point specialist who came to Fayetteville from Zagreb, Croatia.

"My friends back home don't really grasp the concept yet," says Rimac, a fifth-year senior. "They don't understand that in Arkansas there are no pro teams. Everyone is a Razorback fan. The moment I remember is the first time I heard them call the Hogs. I said, 'What is that?' But I learned to love it. Sometimes we will play in an arena and there will only be maybe 15 fans, way up in the rafters. But when they call the Hogs, we hear them."

There's no trouble hearing them at home. The new Bud Walton Arena seats 19,200. The fact that the Hogs average more than 20,000 is a matter the local fire marshal apparently does not want to take up. According to the media guide, Bud's Arena has "more seats in less space than any facility in the world." And they think that's a good thing.

Although Arkansas won the national championship last year and is in the finals now, the Razorbacks aren't troubled by celebrity hangers-on and visiting movie stars.

"Let's see," said Robinson, when asked about famous visitors to the locker room. "Emmitt Smith came by. But I don't think he came to see us. He went to Florida, so he came to that game. I can't think of anybody else.

"I think (star forward) Corliss Williamson is the biggest thing in Arkansas, next to President Clinton."

Some Hogs fans disagree. They feel Williamson is much more popular. After last year's win, a Corliss Williamson Day was declared in Arkansas.

"They renamed my home town (Russellville, Ark.) Corlissville for one day," he said. "And they had a ceremony at my high school when they retired my jersey. They had some of my old teachers from clear back in elementary school come to speak."

"When they say 'Hog wild,' " says Robinson, "they mean it."

A guy like Rimac, who came here from a faraway land to get an education, could end up warped for life. Maybe he already is.

"It seems now," he says, "wherever I go there is some guy in a Hog hat."